Refugees Still Welcome

The General Election campaign is back in full swing with less than a week to go before the vote. Like many I’ve been a little surprised at how well Jeremy Corbyn has been succeeding in getting his message across, despite a generally hostile press and media, though I’ve not been letting myself carried away.

Most shocking have been some of the statements made by a few hard-core opponents of him in the Labour Party, and even in the unlikely event of Corbyn being able to form a government it wouldn’t be surprising if there were enough defections from the party of candidates who got elected though a successful campaign that he led to immediately bring it down.

It’s been a disappointing to see too some of the compromises that Corbyn has had to make, presenting policies that he doesn’t believe in because they are Labour policies, voted for by conference. Wasting a small fortune on Trident is of course one of them; there must be ways those workers involved could be employed on something that makes sense, and time the unions involved were clamouring for this rather than supporting a white elephant for the sake of members’ jobs.

I’m sure too that Corbyn would like to be far more positive about the benefits of immigration and of welcoming refugees and asylum seekers than he has been in this campaign, and ending their often heartless and sometimes illegal persecution by the Home Office. Opinion polls show that the British population would give their support to a fairer and more welcoming approach, but one that his political opponents would pounce on. Labour have few promises, though they do state they would end the indefinite detention of migrants, but on refugees there is only the vague statement that Britain would take in its ‘fair share’.

Clearly the Conservative government have been against that – as the handful of Syrian refugees allowed in and the failure to live up to the Dubs Amendment over bringing in refugee children have shown.

I wasn’t in Parliament Square for all of the rally, and missed the Lord Dubs who was the only Labour politician to speak, along with Caroline Lucas MP for the Green Party and a Lib Dem campaigner Shas Sheehan. I did see Vanessa Redgrave (who I’d also photographed earlier) and Jeremy Hardy, but there were very few MPs making themselves known.

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